Computer animation, the art of creating moving images via the use of computers, is a common form of audio-visual presentation, where the provided content ranges from television programming, feature movies, short films, cartoons, music videos, computer games, video games, and more recently virtual environments. Further, these different forms of computer animation, traditionally presented to the user via a television or within the movie theatre are now presented with, and supported by, a multitude of electronic devices including personal computers (PCs), laptop computers, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), video game consoles (consoles), handheld game consoles (handhelds), cellular telephones (cellphones), and portable multimedia players.
Economically, such computer animation in the form of physical and online sales represents a global business today of approximately $40 billion in 2006, and this is expected to grow to over $65 billion by 2010. Dominant segments of this market today are computer animated feature films, computer games, console games and handheld games. However, the market is expected to include additionally in the near future significant revenue from virtual environments, also known as virtual worlds, Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs), Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs), or Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). MMOGs refers to a wider range of environments than games, which are commonly referred to as Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG), as these MMOGs may include social networks (such as Second Life™ and Kaneva™) through to adult only entertainment (such as Red Light Center™).
With virtual environments reaching millions of users, together with other elements such as monthly subscriptions for all features and the ability to provide avatars with finances via payments from the user's real world finances, it is evident that these virtual environments already generate significant financial revenues. Developments such as the provisioning of virtual shopping environments, where users purchase and receive in reality their selections, as well as the addition of other services offered at a premium, coupled with the number of users growing to tens, if not hundreds of millions, reveals that the commercial revenue from such virtual environments may exceed that of all other physical and online sales of computer animation products and services in the very near future.
However, a couple of significant barriers exist to the widespread deployment of these virtual environments; notably, their resulting commercial success relies on the quality of the users computer persona, their avatars, and the ability of the user to generate characters that are essentially as unique as they are, the provisioning of software to users free of charge to generate their persona, and the amount of data to be transmitted to the online users in the virtual environments. The first arises from the users expectations of virtual environments to reflect reality in complexity and quality of audio-visual experience, whilst the second is an aspect of human nature. Provisioning software free is an aspect of the reality of engaging users into the virtual environment, initially for free and then through the offering of full access or enhanced services in return for a monthly fee, typically a few dollars to tens of dollars. Finally, the amount of data to be transmitted scales directly today with the number of avatars within a given environment simultaneously, and with the quality of the avatars being presented to the users. Throughout the remainder of this document the term “avatar” is employed to refer to a computer animated character. Originating from video games, “avatars” are essentially a player's physical computer animated representation in the game world.
In computer animation, commercially available systems are essentially digital successors to the art of stop motion animation of 3D models and frame-by-frame animation of 2D illustrations. Some examples of current animation software include Amorphium®, Art of Illusion®, Poser®Ray Dream Studio®, Bryce®, Maya®, Blender®, TrueSpace®, Lightwave®, 3D Studio Max®, SoftImage XSI®, Alice®, and Adobe Flash® (2D). For 3D animations of characters, the characters are modeled on the computer monitor and 3D figures are rigged with a virtual skeleton. For 2D figure animations, separate illustrations and separate transparent layers are used, with or without a virtual skeleton. Then the limbs, eyes, mouth, clothes, etc. of the figure are moved by the animator on key frames. The differences in appearance between key frames are automatically calculated by the computer in a process known as tweening or morphing. Finally, the animation is rendered, the rendering providing the features of the skin, clothing, etc.
Such commercial animation software, costing from several hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars, is not designed for widespread release to millions of users with varying degrees of computer skills, nor for free distribution. As a result typically today a virtual environment offers the player a single avatar or a predetermined limited set of avatars from which to select as the basis of their “player” within the game. As such these avatars have been generated typically in accordance with the process presented supra in respect of skeletons, wire-frames, and rendering. Online virtual environments such as the virtual social community Second Life™ provide only 12 avatars for the user to select from, whilst video games such as “Alien Arena 2007” from COR Entertainment offers 11 avatars for the player to base their player upon.
Recently, in order to reduce the complexity of the process for generating avatars, some commercial software suites have been developed that offer the animator such a library of stock avatars from which to select. One such leading commercial software suite being “iClone 2.0” from RealIllusion, which offers 15 base avatars for the animator to select from and manipulate in a limited manner. However, it is worth noting that even offering 100 avatar variants would result in an average of 10,000 repetitions for every one million users, and some variants such as say a beautiful young female character may be disproportionately popular. The repetitive presentation of the same avatars visually to the user but as different “personalities” due to their unique users represents a confusion and frustration to the user. It would therefore be beneficial to provide a way for an animator to rapidly generate an avatar and manipulate their characteristics. Further, rather than requiring the animator to always envision, provide a skeleton, wire frame and render their avatar completely it would be beneficial to provide a solution offering the animator the ability to start or select a relatively small number of input selections, and provide simple intuitive interfaces allowing them to focus their creative skills on the manipulation and refinement of the avatar, whilst offering them a wide range of potential outcomes.
Typically, this would today be achieved by the user creating their user account, logging into the remote servers of the provider of the virtual environment and generating their avatar which is then stored at the central server. As the user engages the virtual environment and they encounter new characters then these new characters are downloaded from the central server to the user, this process occurring in proportion for example from the number of users online and their frequency of movement from one part of the virtual environment to another. With the desire for high quality renditions of the avatars in three-dimensions, both physically and in respect of clothing and accessories, a typical avatar will typically be several megabytes (MB) and may reach several tens of MB when the number of mapped polygons and textures are capable of supporting display in high definition environments. Hence, should a user simply walk through a door into a new room with 10 new characters therein, they will be required to download tens of MB at least, and potentially a hundred MB or more. Such download requirements, even with todays high speed access from cable networks, would result in significant pauses whilst new characters are being loaded, which is why today's virtual environments use low quality avatar renditions.
Clearly, the requirement for transferring large amounts of data in respect of the characters causes a significant issue for not only the customer accessing the virtual environment, but also for the provider of the virtual environment who must have an infrastructure supporting every user, which may be tens or hundreds of thousands of users online simultaneously, with high data transfer rates. It would therefore be beneficial to reduce the requirement for data transfer in respect of the avatars entering and exiting the area surrounding the user so that changes in their environment can be reflected quickly. It would be further beneficial for the data transferred to the user in respect of other avatars to relate to the generation of the avatar, allowing the avatar generation to be executed locally by every user according to characteristics contained within a metadata file received and the display characteristics for that user.